5 Ways B2B Sales and Marketing will evolve in 2016

Sean Zinsmeister, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Infer points out the key changes he expects – from ABM becoming ubiquitous to predictive getting smarter and some others

The world of sales and marketing is a-changing. Of course that’s not news to anyone, but in 2016, change in our industry will accelerate thanks to the innovative new tools more and more companies are adding to their technology stack. However, powerful automation and sophisticated data science aren’t enough. It’s important to keep in mind that the roles, behaviors and processes of marketing and sales folks must adapt as well.

Here are five key changes that I predict will come to fruition in the B2B world this year:

ABM will be the new black

More and more companies will master Account-Based Marketing (ABM). As marketers start to apply the same rigor to outbound marketing that they have to inbound and lead nurturing programs, they’ll open up new revenue engines. B2B companies will be able to look at their full spectrum of prospects and easily identify best-fit accounts. As a result, we’ll see more businesses delivering personalized messages at scale – via custom audiences, video personalization and more.

Predictive ABM tactics will drive more pipeline through better market planning, prospect management, and campaign efficacy measurement. For example, businesses will use predictive-driven account scoring to pinpoint the most likely-to-buy existing accounts, as well as to fill in gaps with new lookalike accounts. They’ll also find new ways to interpret a wide variety of customer signals for a deeper understanding of how to carve up the marketable universe. Smart marketers will use a blend of firmographic, technographic and behavioral data to conduct hyper-segmentation around prospect groups with the highest revenue potential.

We’ll see the balkanization of Marketing Automation

There will be a huge shift in how marketing works with sales. Their roles are blurring and there’s a lot that’s changing when it comes to which tasks are the responsibility of a marketer versus a sales rep. Salespeople are creeping up the funnel, while marketers are creeping down. For example, sales teams are now using what would traditionally be considered email marketing tools to do things like sending (and tracking) personalized 1:1 emails as opposed to generic newsletters. Specialized apps like Yesware, Outreach.io, and Autopilot have become so sophisticated that they’re now starting to infringe on what has historically been considered the territory of monolithic marketing automation systems – email templates, drip sequences, etc.

Predictive intelligence will grow up

According to David Raab, principal at industry analyst firm Raab Associates, 2015 was the breakout year for predictive analytics in marketing, with at least $242 million in new funding for start-ups that pioneer this new technology, compared with $376 million in all prior years combined. 2016 is poised to be an even more disruptive year as businesses increasingly depend on external data signals to develop their sales strategies. In addition, sales will become increasingly automated as predictive analytics gets smarter. Rather than simply providing data for businesses to sift through, predictive platforms will offer dynamic recommendations based on changing variables and sales conditions.

Sales and marketing ops will up their game

A recent Accenture and CSO Insights study found that sales inefficiencies cost companies more than 3.2 percent in possible revenue. With only 51 percent of sales organizations using a formal step-by-step selling process, and only eight percent implementing a formal sales methodology, there is plenty of room for improvement. To increase the less than 40 percent of their time that sales teams spend selling, companies will turn to a combination of training, technology-enabled sales tools, and better use of data and analytics. According to Craig Rosenberg, head analyst at TOPO, 72.4 percent of high-growth B2B organizations plan to buy sales development technology in the next year. He said, “The sales development automation movement is driven by a number of key factors including the increasing importance of sales development, the trend toward targeted outbound prospecting, and the emergence of predictive technology that helps companies to hone in on their ideal customer profile. The big buying trends in sales development over the next year are predictive platforms to manage and optimize all of their sales communications.”

There will be a changing of the guard in enterprise GTM

Enterprise sales recruiters often advise companies to target talent from iconic enterprise software vendors like IBM, Salesforce and Oracle, because those businesses have huge sales machines and well-defined sales training. Most start-ups want to replicate these playbooks, but there’s a changing of the guard underway when it comes to these shining stars of enterprise go-to-market. Now the leading experts are those who’ve cracked the code on how to leverage data science for sales and marketing. Emerging icons like Zendesk, New Relic, and others are scaling rapidly and hitting insane growth rates much faster than legacy software companies because they’re taking a truly data-driven approach. These startups are embracing open architectures and APIs to build best-of-breed technology stacks that meet their GTM needs. In 2016, all eyes will be on these innovative companies to see how they re-write the book on enterprise GTM best practices.

These are just some examples of how the world of B2B sales and marketing is evolving. It will be exciting to watch how these predictions play out and see what new trends emerge over the course of 2016.